Midterms

I have the best job in the world. This is not debatable. As a teacher, I get paid to spend all day talking to people about books, history, philosophy, and theology. In other words, I get paid to do what I used to get in trouble for doing on the job. Add to this the fact that I have the brightest students in the world, once again not debatable, and the best curriculum in the world, and the fact that I can justify reading books as part of my job, and you’ll see that I’m a pretty lucky guy. However, even the most fortunate among us have to do work every now and then, and I have to do work twice a year…midterms and final exams. It’s not that I don’t assign papers or do grading any other time. It’s the fact that for midterms and finals, all my students turn in their papers on the same day, and I have exactly one week to grade all of them and write a progress report for each student.

This has been my week for grading midterms. A hundred and sixty-one of them. Worked in between my regular teaching, eating, sleeping, and family schedule. The solution to this has involved lots of soda, coffee, and candy, as well as staying up until three in the morning. So, basically, college life again. By the end of the week, I am victorious, but it is a costly victory. Here is a picture of me as of this morning…

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If you haven't seen Tweet Mashup yet, go check it out. It's hilarious. Just put two twitter accounts into the machine, and, voila, you get an instant idea of what would happen if two people were merged into one. I was playing around yesterday wondering what would happen if Joel Osteen and Donald Trump were the same person. Here are a couple of the results.

When we think of Martin Luther, we often picture a fat man with a grumpy,
pugnacious disposition. The second part of that picture probably comes from
being familiar with Luther's polemic writings without putting them in the
context of similar writings by other authors of that time period, and also from
not being familiar with Luther's more pastoral writings and sermons. The first
part of the picture, that Luther was a very fat man, comes from the fact that
most of the portraits we have of him come from when he was an older man and had
become portly through the good cooking and good beer of his wife, Katie.

But a witness of Luther's disputation with Eck at Leipzig
paints a very different picture of Luther. Luther was 35 years old at the time,
and this is how he is described:
"Martin is of middle height, emaciated from care and study, so that you
can almost count his bones through his skin. he is in the vigor of manhood and
has a clear, penetrating voice. He is learne…

This passage has stuck in my mind ever since I read The Silver Chair this summer.

For context, Puddleglum the Marshwiggle, along with 2 children and a prince, is trapped in an underground world by an evil witch. The witch uses her powers to try to persuade her captives to forget the world above, telling them that their idea of a sun simply stems from seeing lamps and wishing for a bigger better lamp, and their idea of a lion stems from seeing cats and wishing for a bigger and better cat. After a few moments, Puddleglum answers:

"'One word, Ma'am,' he said... 'One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things--trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Supose we have. Then all I can …